Tag Archives: poem

That’s why I called her,
To pre-empt her from texting me with the usual
“What’s wrong with you people?
You don’t live on twenty acres!”
I said to her, “Pam, would you pah-lease
get those crows to cut out that racket at seven in the morning?
and your cyprus is shedding all over our pergola.
What do you think this is, a public park?”

I meant to look up just a few words for a poem about a geologist friend, but the language was so rich, I couldn’t resist.

The Eruption

We are absolutely dating, he said
As they glided across the abyssal plain.
In the aftershock if that, she
turned on her earphones to an acid rock channel
an aggregate album recommended by Amber.

It’s your angular unconformity I object to,
he continued, and your acting
as if all of us, your Achaean companions,
are just an archipelago about you.

It was a basic, bedrock complaint,
and she buckled a little, inside, like
some kind of breadcrust bomb.
She cast about, cleaved clean from her continental crust.
She was shaken to the core,
He could be so crude.

Don’t think I mean to degrade you, he continued
as he prepared to drill to her core.

It seemed an eon (it was erratic at her epicenter)
Then the erosion began.
The exfoliation of one layer, another,
she fractured, froze,
Her guts as if gastroliths ground them.

In the half-life it could have taken for her heart
to turn to hardpan, something creaked,
a hinge line opened to something inside
a hotspring, an isotope of her essence till now hidden

When I learned that the gene for six fingers per hand is dominant,
I thought about all the children who, in infancy and in secret,
Had had two of their twelve fingers cut off
so they could be normal.

Five fingers plus five equals ten —
the basis of the decimal system and Arabic numerals
and Metric, all very clear-cut.

But why not let twelve digits be the norm
and count in dozens?
(Could it be that the dozens we do count
are because of dozens of fingers in some baker clan?)

Or, some could have theirs amputated at the knuckles
and count by fractions.
The teacher would say, “My aren’t they sharp!”
and divide the class into sections
so they could teach their five-fingered friends
(who would wear prostheses to get a slice of the action).

This would be better than listening to the dull teacher
as she lay equations on the board
and told everyone to do their exercises,
“Chop-chop!”